On January 18, the community of the English Wikipedia made history with its decision to black out its entire project for 24 hours in protest of two proposed US laws — SOPA and PIPA — that would have seriously damaged the free and open Internet, including Wikipedia. The communities of over 30 other Wikimedia projects supported the protest. Many Foundation staff assisted in the effort, handling the technical side of the blackout as requested by the community, providing code and design, facilitating discussions, contributing legal analysis and handling an unprecedented amount of press coverage.

During the blackout, more than eight million US-based readers used the CongressLookup tool to find their political representatives. A blog post by Sue Gardner received more than 13,000 comments, with the overwhelming majority supporting the blackout. Google News listed over 11,000 media stories about the Wikipedia blackout and the other Internet protests of January 18, and #wikipediablackout was tweeted almost 1 million times. Support for both SOPA and PIPA has since dwindled. Observers expect that they will not become law in their proposed form.

The first San Francisco Hackathon was attended by 92 participants, many of them complete newcomers. They attended training sessions about Wikimedia technology, followed by team work on demo projects which were then presented in a showcase session and judged by a jury. The first prize went to "SMSpedia", which allows the user to text a page title to a phone number, who is then called back by the service and can listen to the Wikipedia entry read aloud.

In the first partnership of its kind, mobile operator Orange and the Wikimedia Foundation will provide more than 70 million Orange customers from 20 countries in Africa and the Middle East (AMEA) with mobile access to Wikipedia — without incurring data usage charges. Also in January, the official Wikipedia Android app was announced. It was installed more than half a million times within the first two weeks.

English Wikipedia anti-SOPA blackout — The engineering team supported this online protest by developing and deploying the blackout code and design, including the CongressLookup extension for helping people find and contact their representative. The Operations team disabled editing during the 24 hour time period, and helped keep other systems up and running, including the temporarily overloaded Wikimedia blog.

San Francisco hackathon — More than 90 participants learned and hacked during this outreach-focused developers week-end. The teams of participants demonstrated more than a dozen projects.

Data Centers — Work continued on building up the EQIAD datacenter in Virginia. We added new servers and upgraded the database servers with a new chained replication topology and a heartbeat-based replication monitoring. We have also successfully tested the new thumbnail system and the text squid implementation, that we'll start rolling out fully in February. At the same time, we have retired 40 old servers from our Tampa datacenter, which will be available for donation soon.

Wikimedia Labs — To keep up with project growth, we doubled the filesystem storage available and allowed Labs to grow by up to another 30 instances. A number of projects were added or moved to Labs, including incubator, ganglia, deployment-prep, globaleducation, a number of mobile projects, and a bunch more. A number of projects were also created, implemented, and demoed using Labs during the San Francisco hackathon.

Visual editor — Plans for the second phase of the editor project were formulated. The team investigated a possible use of contenteditable to help with input methods and text selections on mobile devices. The parser was also extended with the ability to fetch and expand templates in a parallel and asynchronous fashion. The parser now supports most parts of the English Wikipedia Main Page.

Article feedback — The next round of Article Feedback Tool v5 features was developed, including a new feedback page. The teal continued to collect valuable data from the community about the usefulness of comments coming in from each of the three forms launched in December. A survey to get comments from readers about the effectiveness and attractiveness of each design was also launched. The target date for the full feedback page is Feb. 15 for pre-deployment testing on en-labs, then full deployment on Feb. 22.

Feedback Dashboard — We implemented a leaderboard of recent top responders on the feedback dashboard. New editor feedback is now added to a dedicated log. When feedback is marked as helpful, that fact is displayed on the feedback dashboard itself. Other than a few other smaller changes, we're now moving the project into maintenance mode to focus on article creation workflow and mw:New Page Triage.

Android Wikipedia App — The Mobile team released the first version of the Wikipedia Android application into the Android Market. In just over three weeks, we've had over 900,000 downloads, became the #1 search result for "Wikipedia", became the #1 trending app, and received a consistent 4/5 stars in the Android Market. We released two minor updates to fix bugs, and are processing user feedback to guide our next version.

FeaturedFeeds — We deployed the first version of FeaturedFeeds to production. Wikimedia communities can now make use of these RSS feeds to better surface their content to other applications.

MediaWiki 1.19 — A new Beta cluster, replicating the production environment, was set up to allow Wikimedians to test upcoming software (including MediaWiki 1.19) on Wikimedia Labs before deployment. A preliminary schedule was drafted, according to which deployment of MediaWiki 1.19 will start on February 13th and complete on March 1st.

Volunteer coordination and outreach — In preparation for the San Francisco hackathon, the team prepared training materials and documentation on gadgets and the MediaWiki API. Nine developers got commit access in January, among which seven volunteers.

Wikimedia blog maintenance — The new WMBlog plugin (which brings functionality specific to the Wikimedia blog independently of the theme) was deployed in January, as well as tweaks to the theme. Due to the SOPA/PIPA blackout-related traffic, the Operations team moved the blog to a newer, more powerful server and added caching layers (Varnish & Memcached).

Daniel Mietchen lead the drafting and submission of a response to the White House RFI on Public Access to Scholarly Publications.

The open data consultation we launched in December closed with 100 responses. The results will be published this month.

Several Research Committee and community members worked on the English Wikipedia article for the Research Works Act, a proposed bill that would undermine open access mandates for publicly funded research in the US. The bill would affect our research policy as it would make it hard for RCom to enforce any OA and open data requirements for research collaborations. The article made it to DYK on January 15, 2012.

Dario Taraborelli gave a podcast interview with Michael Cervieri for the Future Journalism Project, discussing what Wikipedia can do to support data journalism.

We set up a Wikimedia group on the DataHub, an open data repository powered by CKAN. The repository is for testing purposes but all data deposited will be preserved and migrated once we've finalized the configuration of the repository.

Mayo Fuster Morell circulated a call for papers calling for contributions on "Academic research into Wikipedia: Beyond English Wikipedia and towards comparative perspectives". The submission deadline is March 1, 2012.

Tilman Bayer led the publication of the first 2012 issue of the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.

Other than new community requests to test on the Wikimedia Incubator and Commons, the majority of template A/B tests have been wrapped up. Ryan Faulkner, formerly part of the fundraising team, has joined our group as the Community Research Analyst to further understand template testing results, and the group is now publishing test results on Meta as they come in.[1]

The Community Dept. is hosting the first 2012 meet-up of California Wikipedians at the Foundation offices on Saturday, Feb 4 — coinciding with the Board of Trustees meeting. [2]

We are planning a series of meet-ups with Brazilian editors in early March to better understand their community and its dynamics, and give those authors a place to voice issues that the Foundation may be able to assist with. [3]

Collecting resumes and scheduling preliminary screenings of candidates for the 2012 Community Summer Analysts, whose work will focus on providing working data and actionable recommendations for community change programs. [4]

Wrapping up a proof-of-concept analytic project with Odiago, who has provided some insight into authorship questions with big data analysis of our diff data.

Gathered all fundraising staff and contractors in San Francisco for the 2011 Fundraiser Retrospective. We recapped accomplishments, and identified pain points and successes in communications and process so that the next fundraiser can be run more smoothly with a leaner team.

Began writing the 2011 Fundraiser Report which will be publicly posted in 2012.

Held a planning session for the 2012 Fundraiser. Over two days, the team set priorities for this year and focused on mapping out a division of responsibility, communication and tracking processes, ways to improve localization, testing, donor experience, and analytics systems.

In conjunction with the Brazilian author meet-ups, we are planning focus groups and storyteller interviews in both Brazil and Argentina.

Created a testing calendar to plan out regional tests throughout the year. These tests will focus on the localization of our forms and appeals in different countries.

Started our global research on currencies, payment methods and personal information fields to integrate to the regional tests.

Began researching new payment methods requested by Wikipedia users during the 2011 fundraiser.

Fellowship recruiting continues - the community generated 23 fellowship project ideas [1] in January and applications have been submitted by candidates from 18 countries. The deadline to apply for this round of fellowships has been extended until February 15th, and review of existing applications is underway.

The fundraising translation project report is complete,[2] and Jon Harald Søby hosted a brown bag presentation at WMF to discuss lessons learned. A survey of the fundraiser translators is also in progress, with nearly 300 responses so far. Feedback will be incorporated into future fundraisers as well as an upcoming project to improve the meta translation request process, which is in the planning stages.

The Teahouse project has recruited 23 Wikipedians to serve as Teahouse hosts - they'll be inviting new editors to the space, answering questions, and facilitating discussions during the pilot.[3] Design of the space is in progress.

GLAMcamp DC, which will take place in early February, is in its final stages of preparation. This has included establishing a proposed framework for GLAM:US collaboration, which will be presented at GLAMcamp and finalized as a goal of the event alongside other documentation and tool development.

Initial coordination talks have begun with Europeana and others who will be collaborating on GLAM tools over the coming year.

There has been ongoing follow-up on leads and expressions of interest from GLAM institutions, as well as consolidation of interested parties and contacts into a single, master list. This streamlining of information will continue at GLAMcamp DC.

We concluded an exercise on distilling lessons from all Indic communities and started the process of seeding ideas with communities. All ideas are centred around community building (and not content creation or improvement), the rationale being that content will follow community. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Program/Indic_Languages

Ideas have been customised by the community and are a combination of what individual volunteers or volunteer groups can do independently, as well as potential pilots that the India Program team can build and run collaboratively with local communities.

There appears to be interesting progress in at least six languages: Hindi, Odia, Assamese, Kannada, Tamil & Malayalam.

The India team is supporting outreach by sharing best practises as well as making a central repository of outreach material. In addition, the team is personally taking part in outreach sessions to provide additional momentum to existing community efforts. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Program/Outreach_Programs

We posted the role in November, and in parallel with an executive search firm which was screening applicants, we asked the Brazilian community to nominate two community members to participate in the interviews with us. They selected two great folks - Everton and Castelo - to interview 10 finalists on a panel with Barry in Sao Paulo.

The next phase for the top 4 finalists was a unique assignment to be done on the br.wikimedia.org wiki: engage the Brazilian community and your fellow candidates on the wiki to address the question of how to grow the PT:WP community? The assignment went well and was a great learning experience for the candidates and for us.

Following the assignment skype and interviews with Jessie, we brought in a top candidate to SF at the end of the month and are in the final stages of of the process.

Frank Schulenburg and Annie Lin documented the measures put in place based on the lessons from the pilot project in Pune, India. (More than 10 different actions have been taken in order to immediately apply the learning points to the Cairo pilot. Among others, these include a longer preparation phase, a heavy involvement of the local community of Wikipedians, a strict limit on the number of participating students, and mandatory professor orientations. More differences on https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Comparing_the_Pune_and_the_Cairo_Pilot_%E2%80%93_what_we_are_doing_differently )

Professors joining the Wikipedia Education Program in the spring 2012 term are finding a new set of participation requirements in place, designed to ensure that all participating professors and students receive adequate support on Wikipedia.

These new participation requirements are largely based on the feedback given by members of the English Wikipedia community.

The requirements set standards for the maximum number of students per Wikipedia Ambassador and the number of Wikipedians involved in the program, and they require instructors to go through a faculty orientation.

Currently, the requirements affect the programs in the U.S., in Canada, and in Egypt during spring 2012, although individual programs may enact stricter requirements as well (for example, the Cairo Pilot will have an even smaller ambassador to student ratio).

Volunteers from the Arabic Wikipedia - supported by Education team members Frank Schulenburg, Annie Lin and Georgetown University professor Rochelle Davis - kicked off the Cairo pilot with workshops for faculty members and Campus Ambassadors. These workshops were almost 100% in Arabic.

In late January, seven community members of the Arabic Wikipedia completed an Online Ambassador orientation organized by other Arabic-speaking Wikipedians and supported by Annie Lin.

The Wikipedia blackout is January 2012's standout story, possibly the story of the year for WMF and Wikipedia, and maybe the most important story in our history. The days before and after January 18, 2012 were almost exclusively focussed on supporting WMF's work around the community mandate to bring about a blackout, including consulting on messaging, design, implementation, community outreach and media relations. January also saw the cap-off of our most successful fundraising campaign ever, and saw the introduction of Matthew Roth to the Communications team as Manager, Global Communications.

Undoubtedly one of the biggest stories in the US and the world in January 2012 was the Internet protests on January 18, which largely centered around the Wikipedia community decision to blackout English Wikipedia internationally for one day. Aside from publishing three separate press releases leading up to and after the blackout, the Communications team worked closely with Jimmy Wales on both advance press interviews and a deluge of interview requests the week of January 16.

In total, WMF responded to over 260 separate media inquiries from around the world. News.google.com reports over 11,000 media stories on the topic of our blackout and the Internet protests, many of which focussed primarily on Wikipedia. Jimmy Wales had over a dozen television appearances, effectively positioning the blackout story as the leading story around the world on January 18. Major newswire stories were syndicated interntaionally and in dozens of languages.

Social media activity around the blackout was extraordinary. Users followed the CongressLookup system and tweeted their Representatives to urge action around SOPA/PIPA. #WikipediaBlackout and #SOPA were trending topics for the day. #wikipediablackout was tweeted almost 1 million times, and SOPA was mentioned 2.3 million times.

Media interest continued well after the week of January 16 and Communications continues to support inquiries. We're also working on a series of feature stories about the blackout in major magazines and placed OpEd stories in either the NY Times or Washington Post.

Wikimedia's global network of chapters also fielded dozens of requests in their own regions and languages, further augmenting the world-wide footprint of the blackout. Media coverage was largely positive and supportive of the efforts of Wikipedia's community. The bill supporters have since withdrawn both SOPA and PIPA, shelving them indefinitely, based largely on a historic level of constituent reaction and Congressional contact in the US.

WMF returned to one of its early business partners in January, announcing a major partnership to make Wikipedia available at no charge to mobile subscribers in dozens of their territories throughout Africa and the Middle East. This was the first major partnership announced regarding WMF's efforts to dramatically increase access to Wikipedia through mobile channels around the world. Coverage was largely positive and supportive of the effort.

Joady Lohr has joined us as the new Director of Human Resources. Joady handles aspects of human resources as related to compensation, benefits, policies, etc. and is already an indispensible part of our team. She comes to us with years of experience at IDEO and Business for Social Responsibility (BSR), both of which speak to her experiences working in HR with global organizations.

In recruiting, we are iterating changes to http://jobs.wikimedia.org , and hosting a focus group with community members to ensure that the page communicates that we welcome community members applying for roles with the Foundation. Feedback on the page is welcome. We are also rolling out Jobvite as our recruitment and applicant tracking software to streamline our recruiting process.

We have also begun redesigning some of our internal processes, such as onboarding and hiring, including a revision of our hiring contracts and agreements with heavy and wonderful support from Legal.

Like the rest of the WMF office and community, Legal provided strong support to the SOPA/PIPA blackout strategy, including advising the community on the SOPA Initiative page, helping coordinate cross-functional issues, and reviewing various legal issues associated with the blackout. We are now engaged in post-blackout strategy with other departments. Our present thinking is to leverage the positive response following the blackout to support messages that explain and advocate the open and free knowledge movement as it applies to Wikimedia values.